Blu Kennedy (no relation) is the nom de porno of a young lad who is about half my age and a ginger. The ideal man? Not quite.

[I’ll renew my objections to the Stroop-effect-like misnaming of orange objects as “blue.” A lad with orang(e) hair should not be calling himself Blu(e). It is baffling, short-circuiting, showstopping.]

I read Ben’s BigMuscle profile from time to time. That profile seems to vex him somewhat. A few weeks ago it said he was living the high life in New York bartendering at Splash and go-go-boying, which I guess is a verb. He’s from Oklahoma and Kansas and is a mere 25 years old. He has a high-school education, according to his MySpace page.

Yesterday his BigMuscle profile showed he had changed his username to BNJ, though it also listed his real name as Ben. The photos were unchanged – a trim, hairless, slowly balding redhead. Today the profile is gone (though, true to BigMuscle engineering incompetence, you can still look at all the pictures).

Now, I refer you to John Waters’s statement, perhaps in Timothy Greenfield-Saunders’s Thinking XXX, that when you watch straight porn you kinda feel sorry for the people (really the girls) doing it, but when you watch gay porn you never feel that way. This strikes me as pretty accurate. There’s a lot of drug abuse in gay porn, and of course there persists the absolute outrage of bareback porn, but most of the time it seems like a nice healthy outlet for male sexuality. (And, if you can find the obscure Dagenham Dave Show, gay porn can even be amusing. That series may be the only soft-core gay pornography extant, if we exclude those videos shown at Woody’s of guys languidly showering in the great outdoors.)

Ben must have had a grand old time during his “scene” with dapper, sensitive Árpád Miklós, the thinking man’s “porn star.” Who better to go 3D with? (One can imagine enjoying an apéritif with him at a well-designed cocktail bar – perhaps something out of late-’90s Wallpaper. We could discuss the Hungarian double-acute.)

I’m just trying to understand the career path and life progression of Blu Kennedy. Was he the kind of boy who knew he was gay very early and came out almost as early? (According to an interview, his mom must have suspected something when he found what every gay man has at one point maintained, a porn stash. Really, the scene in Queer as Folk where Stuart and Vince clean out the dead man’s porn so his mom won’t stumble upon it is only barely dramatized.) Ben lived in San Francisco and liked it there.

But when you move to New York and you’re young and in good shape and a ginger, does it just stand to reason you’ll bartend in your underwear at Splash, and dance on the speakers, and earn extra cash via porn? Isn’t it inevitable?

The bartending business seems like a great way to incur permanent hearing loss. But it gets you out there, doesn’t it? You’ve got twinks admiring your gingery form all night long. And if they want more, they can pay for it cleanly and antiseptically, without the tackiness of actual “escorting.”

But I’m still asking: Is it really a nice uncomplicated career and life progression to splash onto the scene at Splash and online in your mid-20s? Isn’t it better to do porn when you’re older, like Miklós, and have lived a little? Of course you are of legal age, but do you truly know better?

That other ginger performer, Will Clark (no relation), once wrote that he sees his porn career as a reminder that at one time he was a smoking-hot, high-demand piece of meat. Are a photographer, a set, and a contract really needed for that?

As with Miklós, we already know what Blu Kennedy looks like naked. Why not try something a tad more creative, less obvious, more indirect? If you look around a little, you can find a really smashing photo of the young lad, plasticky alabaster skin deployed to some effect, acting like a mannequin in a store vitrine. This icy Aryan-android look may be a better use of Blu Kennedy’s hereditary gifts. It’ll be something he can look back on with a smile.

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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2009.06.12 14:49. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: http://blog.fawny.org/2009/06/12/blukennedy/

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